정서지능이 항공사 승무원의 정서노동과 웰빙에 미치는 영향

Abstract

Flight attendants perform a high level of emotional labor. As the COVID-19 pandemic prolongs, the intensity of the emotional labor of flight attendants has been on the rise. Maintaining their positive emotions, mental and physical health has become an important research issue in the tourism industry. In the previous studies on the emotional labor of the airline industry, there have been many studies on negative variables caused by emotional labor. However, the study of only emotional labor and negative variables had a limitation of not providing an implication for the positive aspects of individuals obtained by continuing emotional labor in the daily work performance of flight attendants. Also, the antecedent variables of emotional labor were not studied in various aspects, and flight attendants' emotional labor process from the antecedent to the result has not been studied much in the tourism sector. Due to the limitations, this study adopted Grandey(2000)'s framework as an emotional worker's individual aspect and conducted the empirical study that encompasses the emotional labor process of emotional intelligence(input) → emotional labor(process) → well-being(positive result). In addition to this, as flight attendants provide services as a team and cooperate, external circumstances which occur in interpersonal relations such as customer service, and relationships with colleagues mainly affect emotional labor. As Grandey and Melloy(2017) suggested in their research, the relationship and social climate in the work context can be a moderating variable to the individual emotional labor process. Therefore, this research adopted social capital which is the embedded asset in the network as the moderator and analyzed the effect of external situation factors on individual emotional labor processes. The empirical study was conducted from the survey carried out through an online survey from Aug. 19th to Sep. 17th in 2021 by recruiting 337 Korean domestic cabin crew members. Collected data were analyzed by using SPSS 23 and AMOS 23. The results from this study are below. First, emotional intelligence had a positive effect on emotional labor both surface acting and deep acting. Emotional intelligence, the ability to understand one's own and others' emotions, and to regulate and utilize emotions, is enabled one to perform well in emotional labor. Through the results of this study, it was confirmed that emotional intelligence is an important emotional ability in emotional labor performance and plays a key role as an emotional resource that is practically helpful to airline cabin crew. Second, deep acting increases the well-being of emotional workers and mediates the relationship between emotional intelligence and well-being. It was confirmed that the well-being of flight attendants can be improved by doing deep acting. And it was analyzed that higher emotional intelligence can induce deep acting which consequently results in higher well-being. As the role of deep acting has been demonstrated, it is necessary to encourage deep acting rather than surface acting. Third, this study demonstrated social capital as the moderating variable which strengthened the negative influence between surface acting and well-being. This study supports the argument of previous studies that individual emotional labor performance can be regulated by situational factors. To provide detailed implications, the moderating effect analysis of sub-factors was additionally verified and found when structural and cognitive dimensions of social capital become too high, it was analyzed that the negative effect of the surface acting on well-being is stronger. Therefore, it is necessary for organizations to closely manage social capital levels so that the negative impact of it does not appear. The limitations of this study and suggestions for future research are as follows. First, the research was performed when the flight attendants suffered from difficulties by irregular scheduled shifts due to COVID-19, the result can differ if it is done during the regular shift. Second, this study was confirmed when social capital reached too high, the negative influence of the surface acting on well-being got higher. If follow-up studies are conducted later, it seems that it is necessary to consider positive situational variables as well.